What I Learned About Project Management By Planning My Wedding: Part 4
Photo by Braňo via Unsplash
Lesson #4: Use your values and budget to guide decision-making.
Have you ever noticed that whenever the word “wedding” comes up, it seems like things cost an extra 50-100%? The same bouquet of flowers you can send a friend for her birthday seems to cost double once you clarify that it’s for a wedding. Likewise with invitations, entertainment, or just about everything. It seems like anyone and everyone is out to make a buck with weddings, and I totally get that. Weddings are a multi-billion dollar industry, and if what I’ve been reading is true, it sounds like prices have only gone up since the pandemic…I’m not here to argue whether or not that is justified, but I bring it up to point out that early on in my wedding planning process, my fiance and I realized that if we weren’t careful, things were going to get out of control fast from a budget perspective.
So, what could we do to try to keep things under control? Once we started getting quotes from vendors, we realized that our budget was going to skyrocket if we went with the best-of-the-best all-inclusive plans for everything. So, as we were deciding what to spend our money on, it made sense to sit down and talk about what was really important to us. We had decided that our vision for our wedding was that it would be a welcoming event, specially for our large number of out-of-town guests, that we wanted it to be romantic (of course), but also really, really fun. Once we got clear on those values, we started using them as a lens to evaluate our vendors, which helped us make a few key decisions. For example, we found one caterer that was a complete bargain price compared to anyone else. At first, we were a bit skeptical about whether that would work for us (being that conventional wedding values seems to be “spend a lot on the food and make it exquisite), but after we had a tasting and LOVED the food, we realized that if we saved on the catering costs, we could splurge for some really exciting entertainment options at the reception. Or in other words, we could still welcome guests with delicious food, but we could also live our value of having fun by making the reception entertainment extra special.
Ultimately, we used a combination of staying true to our values, and keeping our budget at the forefront of decisions that needed to be made. I think this lesson holds for non-wedding projects as well, and it’s not something I’ve really spent a lot of time applying in my corporate life. So much of real-life project management seems to become “Meet the deadlines at any cost,” but I think if we all took a step back every so often to map our projects to our values, we might be able to make some decisions that are more in-line with what we want for our organizations. I think this would also benefit those of us who are working with or for companies that have too many projects and priorities that collide. If we took a step back to rank our projects against what we say we value, I imagine we’d come up with a much shorter list of things that we actually need to do. And if we could get more focus on fewer initiatives (see post #1), we would probably all have a lot more fun and find more meaning in the projects we do.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Have you planned a wedding, or other big event? Did you stick to your values and budget? Is it possible to plan a wedding and not get swept-up in the wedding industry hype?